India's AI Infrastructure Play

The infrastructure constraints of artificial intelligence are reshaping global capital flows and competitive dynamics in ways that favor new entrants and new geographies. When Micron reports it can only meet 50% to 66% of demand from key customers for memory chips, that's not a production problem. It's a signal that the physical bottlenecks of the AI era are creating entirely new market structures.

Adani's $100 billion commitment to build AI-ready data centers across India reflects this shift. The capital requirements are so massive and the timeline so extended that traditional tech incumbents can't move fast enough. This opens space for industrial conglomerates with balance sheets built for infrastructure-scale projects. India becomes competitive not through software talent alone, but through the ability to deploy capital at speed into power generation, real estate, and cooling systems.

Meanwhile, the FTC's investigation into Microsoft shows how bottlenecks attract regulatory attention. When customers have few alternatives, licensing terms and training costs become antitrust issues. The pattern is clear: scarcity in foundational infrastructure layers creates both opportunity for massive capital deployment and scrutiny of anyone controlling chokepoints. The question is whether new capacity arrives before regulatory intervention reshapes existing market power.

Deep Dive

Founder Pedigree Now Commands Infrastructure-Scale Valuations

Ricursive Intelligence raised $335 million at a $4 billion valuation just four months after launching, with barely a product in market. This isn't typical seed-stage risk pricing. It's infrastructure investment at VC scale, and it signals how capital allocation is changing when the bottleneck is talent rather than technology readiness.

The founders, Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, created AlphaChip at Google, an AI system that designs chip layouts in hours instead of the year-plus human designers require. Their track record matters because chip design is now a critical path constraint for AI development. Micron can only meet 50-66% of demand from key customers, but manufacturing capacity is just part of the problem. The design process itself takes too long. If AI can design better chips faster, it accelerates the entire hardware development cycle that currently gates AI progress.

For founders, this creates a template: if you have demonstrable technical leadership in a bottleneck domain, you can raise at post-product-market-fit valuations before you ship. The bar is that your solution must address a constraint that can't be solved by throwing more conventional capital at it. For VCs, it means writing checks that look more like infrastructure project finance than traditional venture risk. The four-month timeline from founding to unicorn status suggests limited price discovery. When Nvidia, AMD, and Intel all become investors and customers simultaneously, you're not in a competitive market. You're allocating scarce capacity in a domain where supply can't catch up to demand for years.

Cloud Licensing Becomes the New Browser War

The FTC investigation into Microsoft's cloud practices targets the same competitive dynamics that defined the browser wars, just relocated to infrastructure software. When it costs customers four times as much to run Windows Server on AWS versus Azure, that's not neutral pricing. It's using control of one layer to tilt the playing field at another.

The inquiry focuses on whether Microsoft makes it prohibitively expensive or technically difficult to run its software on third-party clouds. This matters because enterprise software lock-in now compounds across layers. If your identity, security, and productivity tools are Microsoft, switching cloud providers means either paying substantial premiums or rewriting significant portions of your stack. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority already recommended designating Microsoft and AWS with "strategic market status" for potential intervention.

For tech companies, the risk model has shifted. Market dominance in any foundational layer now carries regulatory overhead that can reshape business models years after you've captured the market. Google complained to EU antitrust authorities about Microsoft's cloud licensing, which inverts the usual dynamic where regulators chase the newest platforms. Here, established players are weaponizing regulation against each other's infrastructure positions.

The broader pattern: as software moves to subscription and cloud delivery, licensing terms become the new choke point. This creates opportunity for startups that can credibly offer portability or for challengers that can absorb regulatory attention while their platforms are still growing. The window for building durable infrastructure positions without triggering intervention is closing faster than the typical path to category dominance.

Signal Shots

UK Data Centers Meet Green Belt Politics : Equinix plans to build a $5 billion data center on farmland near London after local authorities reclassified the site as "grey belt," a new UK designation allowing construction on underperforming green belt parcels. The local council approved the project despite objections from residents outnumbering support by nearly two to one. This matters because AI infrastructure demand is colliding with land use politics across developed markets. Watch whether organized local resistance can slow deployment timelines enough to shift where hyperscale capacity gets built, and whether other countries adopt similar grey belt mechanisms to fast-track critical infrastructure through environmental protections.

Ireland Opens Grok Investigation as Regulatory Pressure Mounts : Ireland's Data Protection Commission launched an inquiry into X's Grok AI after reports the chatbot generated non-consensual intimate images, joining investigations already underway in the UK, EU, Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, and Malaysia. X restricted the image generation feature but faces potential GDPR violations around data processing principles and impact assessments. Multi-jurisdiction investigations mean X's legal team must defend under different regulatory frameworks simultaneously, from GDPR to the UK's Online Safety Act. Watch whether this creates a template for rapid coordinated regulatory response to AI safety issues, and whether compliance costs fragment product capabilities by geography.

Passive RFID Tags Gain Streaming Sensor Capabilities : A new ISO standard enables passive RFID tags to stream continuous sensor data without batteries by allocating frequency channels for each device when energized by radio waves. Japanese consortium members including Panasonic, Keio University, and Denso Wave developed the specification to enable unpowered sensor networks for industrial monitoring and predictive maintenance. This shifts the economics of IoT deployments by eliminating battery replacement costs and enabling sensors in previously impractical locations. Watch whether this enables genuinely ambient computing infrastructure or remains confined to industrial use cases, and how energy harvesting capabilities evolve as edge computing pushes toward zero-power devices.

Oracle Promises MySQL Reset After Community Revolt : Oracle committed to a "new era" for MySQL following criticism over slowed development and governance concerns that pushed community members to discuss forking the open source database. The company pledged to publish development roadmaps, move commercial-only features into the free Community Edition, and facilitate outside contributions. The intervention comes after MySQL commits dropped sharply and Oracle cut engineering staff. Watch whether Oracle follows through with meaningful governance changes or whether the community proceeds with a fork and independent foundation model. The outcome will signal whether large vendors can maintain credibility as stewards of critical open source infrastructure.

Chinese AI Startup Doubles Valuation in One Month : Moonshot AI is targeting a $10 billion valuation in a funding round expansion just one month after raising $500 million at $4.3 billion, with Alibaba, Tencent, and other backers committing over $700 million to the first tranche. The startup behind the Kimi chatbot reflects strong investor appetite for Chinese AI models that can compete with Western alternatives. Valuation compression timelines suggest limited price discovery when strategic buyers see geopolitical advantage in domestic AI capabilities. Watch whether this financing pace becomes standard for frontier model companies or whether rapid revaluations signal a correction ahead as technical differentiation proves harder to sustain than capital raising.

Memory Shortages Drive Refurbished PC Market Growth : Refurbished PC sales through European distribution rose 7% in Q4 as memory chip shortages push new device prices higher, with chipmakers prioritizing high-margin AI datacenter components over consumer parts. Roughly 40% of refurbished sales concentrate in the 200 to 300 euro price band, while the 300 to 400 euro tier expanded from 15% to 23% of the market. Component constraints are creating structural demand for secondary markets that previously served only the most price-sensitive buyers. Watch whether this becomes a permanent feature of PC economics or whether it reverses when memory supply rebalances, and how upcoming EU Right to Repair legislation affects device availability and repairability across both new and refurbished channels.

Scanning the Wire

India has 100M weekly active ChatGPT users, Sam Altman says : OpenAI's CEO reports India now hosts the largest student user base globally, signaling how AI adoption is expanding beyond traditional tech markets. (TechCrunch)

Infosys partners with Anthropic to develop AI services for telecom : The Indian IT giant will build Claude-based solutions for telecom operators before expanding to finance, manufacturing, and software development, with shares rising 2.8% on the news. (Wall Street Journal)

Password managers vulnerable if servers compromised, researchers find : Academic researchers demonstrated exploitable weaknesses in three popular password managers that claim to protect credentials even when their infrastructure is breached. (The Register)

Open source registries face funding crisis for basic security : Registry operators are struggling to cover bandwidth costs and security implementations, with a security foundation co-founder warning of financial peril after reviewing their books. (The Register)

Memory shortages may delay Switch 2 and next PlayStation : Sony is considering pushing its next console to 2028 or 2029 as AI datacenter demand absorbs memory chip production, with both Sony and Nintendo squeezed by rising costs and limited supply. (The Verge)

Michigan sues oil companies over EV and renewable energy suppression : The state filed an antitrust lawsuit alleging oil companies deliberately hobbled electric vehicle and renewable energy development, as the energy industry pushes for laws banning climate liability cases. (Ars Technica)

Google's Android XR design docs reveal glasses interface details : Developer tools and design documentation show mandatory physical buttons and a "Glimmer" UI design language for Android XR glasses launching in 2026. (9to5Google)

Hollywood groups challenge Seedance 2.0 video generator : Industry organizations are pushing back against the new AI video model, calling it a tool for blatant copyright infringement. (TechCrunch)

Valve warns Steam Deck OLED will be intermittently out of stock : The company updated its website to cite memory and storage shortages affecting availability in the US and other regions, with units already sold out for several days. (The Verge)

Outlier

The Vanishing Supercar Fleet : High-end rental operators are discovering that their Lamborghinis and Rolls-Royces are disappearing from GPS tracking systems for hours at a time, only to reappear with customers who claim the vehicles never left monitored routes. The pattern suggests sophisticated GPS spoofing has moved from nation-state domains into consumer crime. When luxury goods become testbeds for counter-surveillance technology, it signals that electronic monitoring infrastructure is becoming both ubiquitous enough to warrant circumvention and vulnerable enough to defeat with accessible tools. The gap between deployment of tracking systems and their actual reliability is wider than the business models built on top of them assume.

The farmland data centers and grey belt reclassifications tell you everything about this era: we're building monuments to compute on ground that used to grow food, and calling it progress because the alternative is building them somewhere else. At least the refurbished PCs are getting cheaper.